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Copper Creek mini golf recently opened at the Nature's Art Village in Montville, which also hosts the dinosaur park, New England's largest splash pad and gift shoppes. The owner says he is surprised how far people travel to try the challenging course. More here.

Copper Creek mini golf recently opened at the Nature's Art Village in Montville, which also hosts the dinosaur park, New England's largest splash pad and gift shoppes. The owner says he is surprised how far people travel to try the challenging course. More here.

For three or four years, Roger Phillips considered adding a miniature golf course to his network of attractions at Nature's Art Village in Montville, which he and his wife Linda own. If he was going to do it, Phillips says, he wanted to do it right. The result is the 18-hole, "tournament-style"...

Locals and outsiders gathered for the North Branford Potato & Corn Festival, also known as the PoCo Fest, at the Northford Fairground for a weekend of rides, a tractor pull, live music, and a feast of corn and potatoes.

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Arts

Hershey Felder has made a career out of dramatizing the lives of famous composers. He dresses like them, plays their greatest works live on piano, and he brings out the real-life human stories behind the music. He never repeats himself. Felder has chosen an extraordinary range of composers to portray...

"I think I'm typecast," says Phillip Huber. Fourteen years ago he was asked to supply a puppet dog for a new musical called "Road to Hollywood" at Goodspeed Musicals' Norma Terris Theatre. The theater called again this year to ask Hubert to design a dog for another new musical, "Darling Grenadine."...

It had bangs and whimpering sounds, bullies and victims, politics and personal issues. It ended with a chef serving appetizers to the audience. Yes, with the world premiere of "Raging Skillet" at TheaterWorks, the 2016-17 Connecticut theater season is officially over. Please note that the 2017-18...

Museums

As an artist-in-residence for five years at Hygienic Art Galleries in New London, Casey Spec wrote a novel about a young Connecticut man with a troubled childhood. "It's about growing up weird, feeling isolated, always having an antagonist in your life, always having issues with your family," says...

Winslow Homer is best known for his seascapes, energetically capturing scenes of seamen battling against the elements. But that was just half of his career. Starting out as an artist, Homer created engravings for nationally circulating magazines, depicting men at war, women at work, children at...

The saying goes that "there are no atheists in foxholes." The Knights of Columbus Museum in New Haven, which tells the history of that Catholic organization, seems an appropriate place to re-create the holes that doughboys stood in during World War I battles. During those battles, prayers — from...

You have to be a big "Doctor Who" fan to have any idea what is going on on that long-running show at any given time. RiffTrax, which specializes in turning weird shows into gut-busting entertainment, will have a blast taking it down a few pegs. RiffTrax — the live riffing team made up of "Mystery...

"Quatsch" is the German word for nonsense. A film showing Aug. 23 at Bethel Cinema tells the story of a particular kind of nonsense. "Quatsch" is about the village of Bollersville, an average small town containing nothing extraordinary, except for the Coati Gang. The gang is made up of six preschoolers...

Family Fun

Thousands of spectators and car and motorcycle enthusiasts converge at the Farmington Polo Club, 152 Town Farm Road, Aug. 25 to 27 for the Dream Ride Experience, a fundraiser for the Special Olympics. The motorcyle Dream Ride, which spans 40 miles through Connecticut, leaves from the polo club...

In just two years, Tenzin Masselli has built a loyal congregation in his quaint board game cafe on Main Street in Middletown. Still, the Board Room's doors are open for many more to join the gaming community, Masselli says. "Our goal is to make sure that you can play the kind of games that you...

Walk through the door of Spark VR in Vernon, and you'll see four spaces partitioned by a curtain, a projector screen on the back wall of each one, and a person strapped into a headset with joysticks swinging their arms around. Strap on the headset, and you'll be in an entirely different world. ...

Things To Do

Originally from the midwest, comedian Sebastian Maniscalco moved to Los Angeles a couple of decades ago when he was in his 20s. His big break turned out to be a slot on Vince Vaughn's 2006 Wild West Comedy Show tour and subsequent 2008 documentary film. Since 2009 Maniscalco has unleashed his incredulous...

Norm Macdonald's been declared "a modern master of the long joke" (by the pop culture site Vulture) and "one subversive, hilarious dude" (by Paste magazine). A viral video of Macdonald telling his ersatz-erudite "Moth joke" to Conan O'Brien was sent around the web with this title: "People Are Saying...

Chapel Hill, N.C., has given the world a lot of indie rock sensations: the Archers of Loaf, Superchunk, Polvo and many more. But one of that college town's noteworthy musical calling cards of the '90s was the Squirrel Nut Zippers, a group that mixed hot jazz, calypso, touches of string-band music...

Travel

Lucretia Bingham is on her fourth pilgrimage to Machu Picchu, the "lost city" of the Incas that her grandfather "found" in 1911 and then brought to the attention of the world. A young Peruvian boy led Hiram Bingham III to the overgrown citadel in the jungle. The name Bingham, an historical footnote...

If you’ve never been in the path of totality of a solar eclipse, it can be a hard thing to describe. As the moon passes in front of the sun, an area about 70 miles wide is plunged into darkness – and it’s an experience unlike anything else. But Paul Cox, the observatory and chief astronomical officer...

If you're looking for a vacation with sights and sounds you won't find elsewhere, Newport, R.I., is hard to beat. Throughout the year, "the city by the sea" as it's called, draws fans of "Downton Abbey" and the Gilded Age, who come to tour spectacular turn-of-the-century mansions, feast on fresh...